Call for expressions of interest in hosting the Bernoulli–IMS 11th World Congress in 2024

Preliminary bids / expressions of interest should be emailed to the IMS and Bernoulli society presidents (Xiao-Li Meng meng@stat.harvard.edu and Susan Murphy samurphy@fas.harvard.edu) and cc’ed to the BS president-elect ( Claudia Klüppelberg, cklu@ma.tum.de). The due date for bids is June 29, 2019.

A preliminary bid should specify names and affiliations of academics who have provisionally agreed to serve on the Local Organizing Committee. It is important that this team contains sufficiently many energetic people to cover fully the oversight of this big event, but in particular the team should also include a couple of senior academics in probability and statistics who have strong research records and international profiles, and who are prepared to commit to ensure the proposed congress will successfully add great distinction to their institution. The Local Organizing Committee should be diverse, with all individuals playing significant roles. In many cases, the Local Organizing Committee will obtain the assistance from conference organizing professionals.

It is helpful if preliminary bids contain information about the following:

1: The proposed site for the congress. It is especially important to be clear about this if the proposed Local Organizing Committee involves names from across the immediate local region!

2: A range of proposed dates (typically summer in northern hemisphere). The selection of this range should involve explicit consideration of various competing meetings and conferences around the world — to the extent that details are known at this advanced stage of planning.

3: Consideration of likely attendance numbers: for this, and for much other relevant data, the World Congress history page of the Bernoulli Society will be very helpful; it will become clear that numbers can vary to some extent with congress location.

4: Meeting facilities: there needs to be access to a large auditorium potentially able to accommodate 700 attendees, in addition to an adequate supply of breakout rooms for smaller sessions, and good supply of space for discussions over tea/coffee.

5: Accommodation: there needs to be a good supply of reasonably priced local accommodation. It is particularly helpful if some very cheap and basic accommodation is available for (for example) younger colleagues.

7: It is useful to supply cost estimates on venue rent, catering twice daily coffee breaks, office staff support, for a range of attendance from 500 to 700 participants.

8: Based on the previous item, it is helpful to estimate a range of potential registration fees. As a very rough guide, registration fees should be loosely in line for example with those charged for the 2019 European Meetings of Statisticians and the 2018 IMS meeting.

Overall cost is a particularly sensitive issue to the IMS and Bernoulli Society members, who include both young academics with very limited access to research funds, and distinguished academics from developing world countries who also find it a great challenge to secure sufficient funding to attend meetings. Neither IMS nor Bernoulli Society are in a position to provide substantial financial support, though both societies organize special invited lectures for the Congress, thus ensuring the presence of very high-visibility speakers for whom the relevant society will pay registration, accommodation and transport.